Appropriate treatment, disposition—and occasionally, restoration—of telephone billing accounts which have gone dormant has long been a source of frequent error, confusion, and perceived inequity on behalf of both the telecommunications provider and the customer. In addition to concerns of business ethics and customer satisfaction, telecommunications providers are also faced with issues regarding contractual obligations, compliance, and reporting in accordance with various legal requirements, such as those governing appropriate treatment and remittance of Escheats.
Within the context of inmate telecommunication services, the profile of the issue is raised even higher than would ordinarily be the case, owing to the fact that accounts are typically only used during a period of time when a person known to the account holder customer is incarcerated, and further due to the fact that these persons frequently face periods of incarceration, followed by periods of non-incarceration, followed by a subsequent return to incarceration. Therefore, it is not uncommon for an account to remain dormant for a period of one or more years, only to return to an active state at some later point in time.
Because balances attributed to the customer account may only be used for the particular inmate telecommunications services offered by the telecommunications provider, it is quite common for accounts that go dormant to still have a viable—but effectively, unusable—balance of funds in the account. When the known inmate is no longer incarcerated, the telecommunications provider typically offers no services for which the account balance may be used. Therefore, the telecommunications provider holds the remaining accounting balance during the period of inactivity, unless the customer is sufficiently astute to recognize the outstanding balance and request a refund.
Adding a further layer of complication to the proper handling of such accounts is the fact that the rate at which Local Exchange Carriers (LECs) and wireless carriers re-issue inactivated telephone numbers to subsequent, unrelated parties has increased dramatically in recent years. An example of the complicating effect of a re-issued phone number can be seen in the inmate telecommunications business, where an account with an available balance of funds becomes dormant, and the telecommunications provider subsequently re-issues the phone number to a new party after, for example, 6 months. In this example, the new, unrelated party may now have access to the prior party's remaining balance of funds simply by an inmate placing a collect call to the number. Should the original party then come forward at some later point in time to request a refund, or should the telecommunications service provider remit the account balance to the state under Escheats law, for example, the balance may have already been consumed by the second party and therefore be unrecoverable. This issue is particularly prevalent in the case of prepaid cell phones, as these numbers have a very high “rate of churn”, and are also quite popular for use by inmate families and friends.
Historically, providers of inmate telecommunications services have had no consistent, systematic, or automated method of dealing with these issues. Commonly, unused account balances are simply absorbed by the service provider, despite various regulatory or contractual mandates requiring some more equitable form of treatment. Furthermore, in the case of a prior account owner's account balances being subsequently consumed by a second holder of the same phone number, the prior account owner's funds are typically deemed as non-refundable. The need to provide a more equitable solution, while still maintaining a high level of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, therefore, makes it highly desirable to develop and utilize an automated system capable of tracking, classifying, treating, and occasionally reactivating such accounts.